Family Watch Parties and Emoji Politicization
"my internet knowledge is tea"
Lena Dunham is writing the film adaptation of Michael Lewis’s Sam Bankman-Fried book (hopefully this project will have a better fate than that Polly Pocket movie); 13 Going on 30 is headed to Broadway; you have another chance to see Paul Mescal in Streetcar Named Desire; and 070 Shake’s album will feature Courtney Love.
IT’S FAMILY “SEX SCENES” NIGHT, thecut
Though one expert says that cis boys “generally don’t want to get a boner with their parents,” some families are hosting watch parties for their teenagers, showing them TV shows and movies — Bridgerton, Never Have I Ever, Big Mouth — to counterbalance the impact of mainstream porn, some of which is now dominated by violent BDSM and has led to an uptick in choking among young people.
SHE WAS A CHILD INSTAGRAM INFLUENCER. HER FANS WERE GROWN MEN., nyt
Jacky Dejo, now 18, has been building a fanbase on social media since age 6, when her mother and father launched a parent-run Facebook account. As she approached her teens, she began getting inappropriate attention from men online — and by 16, with the consent of her parents, she was pulling in $50,000 a month by charging for access to salacious photos. The day after she turned 18, much to the delight of her online following, she joined OnlyFans. Dejo’s story “illustrates in rare detail the dangers faced by child influencers everywhere, and how adolescence for many girls is being molded by platforms that value — and monetize — attention from men who are sexually interested in minors.”
TEENS LEARN A NEW CONSPIRACY THEORY EVERY WEEK ON SOCIAL MEDIA, YET MOST SCHOOLS AREN’T TEACHING MEDIA LITERACY, fastcompany
A study by the News Literacy Project found that teens struggle with identifying false information online. About 80% of teens who use social media say they see content about conspiracy theories in their online feeds, with 20% seeing conspiracy content daily; fewer than 40% of teens surveyed reported having any media literacy instruction during the school year, according to the analysis, though some teachers could probably use some “media literacy instruction,” too.
IS THE RED HEART EMOJI MAGA?, usermag
Last Wednesday, I had the sudden realization that I have a habit of punctuating my sentences with the red heart emoji, and, post-election, my most-used emoji felt fraught. Turns out I was not alone in this feeling. I made a TikTok about it that got 118,000 views and many thousand comments, and Taylor Lorenz reached out to me — and a bunch of emoji experts — to talk about the politicization of emojis.
A 2023 research study presented at the Conference on Computational Humanities Research found that a person's political leanings affect what emojis they choose to use regularly, even when those emoji don't have direct political meaning. For instance, they found that users on the left were more likely to use the ✌️and 🌱 emoji, while those on the right were likelier to employ the 💪 and 💯 emoji.
THE BOSSES WHO DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR IVY LEAGUE DEGREE, wsj
“If I were hiring somebody to be my right-hand person today, there’s not a chance in hell it would be an Ivy League person,” says Charlie Gipple, the chief executive of a financial advisory firm. Meanwhile, McKinsey uses a problem-solving game to identify talented people who might have been overlooked in the past — like that “graduates of tiny Grinnell College in Iowa and Santa Clara University” in the firm’s latest crop of business analysts — rather than sticking to “the usual suspects.”
AMAZON LAUNCHES TEMU COMPETITOR CALLED ‘HAUL’, theinformation
As of Wednesday morning, a Temu-like discount storefront under the name “Haul” was visible on mobile in beta to some U.S. shoppers (alas, not mine; I checked), offering items like $3 handbags and $14 pajama sets. This news is especially interesting after learning yesterday that Temu was the most downloaded app among Gen Z this year…
One last thought:
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I think my strongest and clearest conviction coming out of the election last week is that every high school needs to teach a course on media literacy. And you're right, that there also needs to be some kind of mass awareness campaign for adults, too. Earlier this summer my dad (career newspaper editor, now a media studies professor) and I (ex-new media) explained to two of my very intelligent and well-informed friends how fact-checking, libel laws, and opinion vs editorial divisions work at traditional media, and they were blown away.
Vangelis